Mustafa Setmariam Nasar

Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (26 October 1958-) was a Syrian-Spanish al-Qaeda member and author. His writings in the 1990s influenced the growth of jihadism in the 1990s, and he advocated for strategies such as providing services to Muslim civilians to win hearts and minds, maintaining strong relationships with communities and other fighting groups, and focusing on fighting secular governments; he split from al-Qaeda in 1998 after criticizing their strategies, seeing 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan as disastrous blunders on behalf of the jihadist movement and the Iraq War as a miraculous event which saved the jihadist cause.

Biography
Mustafa Setmariam Nasar was born in Aleppo, Aleppo Governorate, Syria on 26 October 1958, and he joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1980 during the Islamist uprising in Syria. He was forced to flee to France due to the government crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, and he later fled to Spain in the mid-1980s. In 1987, he married a Spanish convert to Islam; that same year, he met Abdullah Azzam in Peshawar, Pakistan, and he became an instructor at al-Qaeda training camps and fought in the Soviet-Afghan War alongside the Mujahideen. He became a Salafist writer, writing The Islamic Jihadi Revolution in Syria in 1991 and vehemently attacking the Muslim Brotherhood while providing the intellectual foundation for al-Qaeda and the jihadist current during the 1990s. Nasar moved to London in 1994 after being suspected of assisting the Armed Islamic Group with a series of terrorist bombings in France during the Algerian Civil War, and he founded the Islamic Conflict Studies Bureau in 1997 and facilitated two interviews with Osama Bin Laden. In 1998, Nasar and his family settled in Afghanistan, and he founded a media and research center in Kabul in 1999 and opened the al-Ghuraba Camp in 2000. He split from al-Qaeda due to his criticism of its strategies, instead operating the training camp on behalf of the Taliban; he saw the 9/11 attacks as catastrophic for the jihadi cause. In October 2005, he was arrested in the Pakistani city of Quetta, and he was extradited to Syria to be imprisoned.